Is the U.S. Supreme Court the Biggest Threat to Our Democracy?

 By JIM SMITH

Conventional wisdom and conventional teaching of history tells us that the U.S. Supreme Court is the supreme law of the land, that the only branch of government which isn’t elected can tell the other two branches of government what is and is not constitutional.

But Thom Hartmann took his readers to school on this topic in his Oct. 20th column, The Hartmann Report.

According to Hartmann, “There is literally nothing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court the exclusive right to decide what the Constitution says or means and impose it on the other two branches of government, or on the rest of America. That is a power the Supreme Court took onto itself in that 1803 decision of its own, Marbury v Madison.”

Hartmann continues:

“Instead of putting the Supreme Court in charge of American laws, the Framers of the Constitution did the opposite: they put Congress in charge of the Supreme Court.

“As they wrote in Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution:

“[T]he Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

“Republicans know this well…. Most recently, in the wake of the Obergefell gay marriage decision, Republicans in Congress offered a law stripping from the Court its power to rule that gay people could get married. The Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004 but failed in the Senate, explicitly says:

“No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.”

[End of Hartmann excerpts]

We have heard that Congress has the power to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court, but it turns out, according to the Constitution, that it has complete power over the Supreme Court and how it functions.

Now the Court has been overtaken by rightwing extremists poised, among other things, to make gay marriage illegal, to validate the power of the 30 Republican-controlled state legislatures to ignore presidential balloting and send electors of their choice to the Electoral College, to abolish all forms of local gun control, to end affirmative action by private colleges, and to further gut the 1967 Voting Rights Act.

If that sounds extreme, just consider what the Court has already done:

>   It overturned Roe v. Wade.

> In Citizens United, it allowed unlimited political donations by corporations and their billionaire owners.

> It gutted the power of the EPA to regulate carbon and water pollution.

> It gutted the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

> It approved extreme gerrymandering in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Alabama that demonstrably disenfranchised voters of color.

> It eliminated the right of citizens to sue police officers who don’t read them their Miranda rights.

> It eliminated protection against unreasonable search and seizure by the Border Patrol or other federal officers within 100 miles of any border, including the ocean. No warrant necessary!

All those decisions and the ones to come in the Supreme Court’s current term are based on that 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison in which the court empowered itself to overrule both Congress and the Presidency.

The backlash against Marbury was so great that the Court didn’t rule on the constitutionality of laws again for over 70 years. But today, it’s routine.

Congress has the power to rein in the Supreme Court, revoke its right to overrule its laws and even change the number of justices. Hartmann maintains in his Oct. 20th column that the time is now, because “if we fail, 2024 may be this nation’s last [popular] election for president.”

You can read the full Hartmann column at https://hartmannreport.com/p/are-scotus-republicans-in-on-a-plot.

 

Democracy Is Looking More & More Like an Experiment -- That Could Fail

By JIM SMITH

As a Baby Boomer, I grew up taking democracy for granted, sort of like how a fish takes water for granted. We elected class presidents in school. We held mock United Nations meetings. Every public office was either elected or appointed by elected officials.

In school we had classes in civics. We learned how democracy came about, how it works, and about other models that oppose democracy. We also studied the religions of the world, even in parochial schools.

Elected officials were “public servants” whose tenure was based on maintaining the confidence of voters. Although there were party labels, each legislator voted in a deliberative atmosphere not dictated by his party leaders. "Party-line votes" were less common. 

We had a “middle class” and most politicians wooed the middle class by adopting policies under which the middle class would grow and prosper.

There were more romantic comedies and fewer action and horror movies. There were far fewer guns and much less promotion and acceptance of them.

When Ben & Jerry’s ice cream was founded in 1978, it had a policy that the highest paid executives should be paid no more than five times the lowest paid workers.

Racism, we now realize, was systemic, but hate crimes were rare because political leaders did not embolden those with racist attitudes to act them out in violent ways. The KKK and other white supremist groups existed but they were in the shadows, not recruiting others by appealing to latent racist feelings that we would be embarrassed or afraid to voice publicly.

It felt right to us, and our country was a model for the world. By the late 20th Century, democracy was ascendant, or so it seemed. The “American way of life” was peaceful, honest, rewarding to hard workers, and above all it felt fair. Anti-trust legislation had “busted the trusts,” and unions — the honest ones — built up the middle class, raising wages across the board within a democratic framework.

But life has changed, hasn’t it?

Those who earned or inherited millions of dollars have figured out how to buy democratically elected legislators and get them to vote based on personal interest (campaign donations and more) rather than based on the public good.

They became masters at manipulating the middle and working classes to vote against their financial interests in exchange for promoting their inner prejudices. Fear, they learned, was the best tool for gaining the support of people while working against what used to be their needs and wants. They were able, for example, to sugar coat massive tax cuts for the rich with minor tax cuts for those in the lowest tax brackets.

The Citizens United decision by the Supreme Court legalized unrestricted political donations by corporations, giving us what we have today — a Congress which is owned lock, stock, and barrel by the National Rifle Association, voting against policies like universal background checks which most Americans, including NAR members, support. Why? Because the NRA has been bought, lock, stock, and barrel, by the manufacturers of guns.

Ben & Jerry’s abandoned its five-to-one ratio policy in 1994 when it recruited a new CEO. Today, it’s common for the pay of a CEO to be several thousand times the pay of line workers for the same company — and to get a bonus even when the company is suffering financially and laying off workers. The income gap between rich and poor is obscene now, a condition that in previous times would have led to revolution.

During the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette, when told the peasants had no bread, famously said, “Let them eat cake,” showing how out of touch royalty was. Today it’s different. Certain leaders act on the knowledge that constituents will even suffer hunger if you appeal to their fears of minorities, of crime, and of “socialism,” ignorant of how socialism might serve them.

It’s clear to many now, including me, that the “American Experiment” is just that — an experiment. And experiments can fail. Ours appears to be failing due to the manipulated ignorance of the general population, exacerbated by the death of local newspapers and the purchase of big city dailies by hedge funds interested in profit, not in serving the public good.

My thanks to the readers who support this column through my GoFundMe campaign at www.FundTalkingTurkey.com.

 

‘Citizens United’ Decision Has Transformed the Role of Money in Politics

   Although it's not on the ballot, the fight to "End Citizens United," the Supreme Court decision that allows unlimited political donations by corporations and unions, is growing in importance and in its support among American.

Most people decry the influence of money in politics, which was made worse by the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Ten years later, the effect of the decision, which spawned the creation of “super PACs” can now be quantified.

The ruling said that corporations were the same as “citizens” and had the right to unlimited free speech in the form of cash donations for and against political candidates so long as they don’t coordinate with a campaign. While super PACs must disclose their donors, those donors can be what are known as “dark money” groups which do not need to disclose their donors.  

According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), political spending by outside groups in local races has grown substantially since the ruling came down. Here’s an excerpt of their analysis. Click here to read it in its entirety.

    “Unburdened by contribution limits, it didn’t take long for super PACs to surpass national party committees as the top outside spending groups… Since 2010, each new election cycle is breaking records with ease, with the bulk of the increase coming from a jump in outside spending….

   “Although super PACs must disclose their donors, they can accept unlimited contributions from dark money nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors. Therefore a super PAC can simply list the nonprofit as the donor, keeping the identity of the actual sources of funding secret.”

A second Supreme Court decision in 2014, McCutcheon v. FEC, spurred the growth of individual megadonors by removing the limits on how much an individual donor can give during an election cycle.  The result: in 2018, according to CRP, Sheldon & Marian Adelson gave $123 million, Michael Blomberg gave $90 million, and Tom Steyer gave $70 million. With this kind of money injected into local campaigns by non-local influencers -- often running TV ads with distorted facts or outright lies -- it’s no wonder that, according to CRP, 81% of surveyed individuals support a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.